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Let’s Talk About the ‘Ring’

Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesBryn Terfel and Deborah Voigt in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011 production of “Die Walküre,” on a 45-ton set of movable planks.

“What is it, glossy ones, that so gleams and glistens there?”

Alberich the homely dwarf poses that question to a trio of Rhinemaidens at the outset of Richard Wagner’s four-work cycle, “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

The answer is gold: the devilish root of 16 hours of opera that is unlike any other work of art in Western culture in its ability to hold the interest of each succeeding age, its musical exploration of human psychology, its monumental architecture, its sheer length.

Gold fuels the story of love, power, redemption and renunciation in the worlds of gods and heroes, dwarves and giants, Valkyries and mortals.

The Metropolitan Opera is presenting three complete cycles of the “Ring” production, conceived by the Canadian director Robert Lepage, starting on Saturday and ending on May 12.

The “Ring” and its mythically based libretto, written by Wagner in the middle of the 19th century and then put to music over the next quarter century, is a fruitful mine of interpretation. Every era has found its reflection in it. There has been a Marxist “Ring,” a fairy tale “Ring,” a post-nuclear war “Ring,” a symbolist “Ring,” a multinational corporate “Ring,” an Old West “Ring.”

Wagner himself saw it as “a political parable on the use and misuse of power,” wrote John Louis DiGaetani, a Hofstra English professor, in a collection of essays called “Inside the Ring” (McFarland & Company, 2006). It was also, Professor DiGaetani continued, “a dialectic on the inevitable corruption of capital, an environmental warning against the rape of nature and a philosophical manifesto on the need to remove oneself spiritually from worldly entanglements.”

Mr. Lepage’s conception is neutral and traditional, with one gigantic exception: the 45-ton set, made up of rotating planks on an axis that rises and falls, a balky, creaky leviathan called “the machine,” which also serves as a backdrop for sophisticated video projections. It has drawn much attention from music critics and from audience members either impressed by its maneuverings or wondering if something will go wrong before their eyes.

For the next five weeks, reporters and critics and video journalists at The Times will be using a special Web page to weigh in on the Lepage conception, on Wagner himself, on the story and the music and the spectacle. Here, readers will find practical information about the “Ring” experience, journalistic insight into the production and a wide range of aesthetic judgments.

Please join the conversation. How does the “Ring” apply to our times? What are the themes and ideas that touch us the most today? What “Ring” memories do you have to share?